But we never tire of them, do we?
We wish to worship more than just each other.
We put a god first, sometimes a tree,
write a sonnet to a bird in the black
of night or offer a light to a stranger
and not call it love. But it is. To pull
out a chair is more than manners.
What we tire of is that we never tire of it.
How it guts us. How it fails, then reappears.
Because what is the bird compared to you?
The bird is replaced each morning.
You approach on a red bike in summer
and the poem takes shape. I entitle it
anything but Love, anything but what it is.

I don’t even dig Pound. But in a sunk cemetery in a sinking city
poets stick together. Brodsky is buried two feet away and for him

I leave an MTA card and a wild daisy, mutter about the metaphors
of transit, tell him how last night, with my feet dangling off the shoreline,

I watched a boat bob an emerald wave. I’m less afraid. Less of a coward
than I was a year ago. Now, I am a checklist of risk. When I speak,

the words will not stop falling and this is what I ask before
every decision or task: Am I mechanism of gratification or need?

Am I more than what I feed? Indeed, are we not all an only child
with no sibling to blame? At Ezra’s flat grave, covered in leaves,

I snap up a single shell curled on the slab. There have been no visitors
for a long while so I spray for bugs and the poisoned mist carries

over the dead. It is improper and a little funny and I say to myself,
“Stop spraying shit all over the poets.” Even this fascist one.

The truth is I’d clear any grave. I want to redeem. To save.
That’s my thing. My uselessness. A grim reaper too late. A retired priest.

Above, gulls chat and the cattle stars graze the sky. And at my eyeline,
insects stumble downwards, graceless, like unpardoned angels.